So while the train rushed on Tommy Todd told his sad little story.

CHAPTER II

A SUDDEN STOP

“I don’t remember my father very well,” said Tommy Todd.  “I was real little when he went away.  That was just after my mother died.  My grandmother took care of me.  I just remember a big man with black hair and whiskers, taking me up in his arms, and kissing me good-bye.  That was my father, my grandmother told me afterward.”

“What made him go away from you?” asked Flossie.  “Didn’t he like to stay at home?”

“I guess maybe he did,” said Tommy.  “But he couldn’t stay.  He was a sea captain on a ship, you know.”

“Of course!” cried Freddie.  “Don’t you know, Flossie?  A sea captain never stays at home, only a little while.  He has to go off to steer the ship across the ocean.  That’s what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t want you to,” returned Flossie, as she nestled up closer to her brother.  “I want you to stay with me.  If you have to go so far off to be a sea captain couldn’t you be something else and stay at home?  Couldn’t you be a trolley-car conductor?”

“Well, maybe I could,” said Freddie slowly.  “But I’d rather be a sea captain.  Go on, Tommy.  Tell us about your father.”

“Well, I don’t know much,” went on Tommy Todd.  “I don’t remember him so very well, you know.  Then my grandmother and I lived alone.  It was in a better house than we have now, and we had more things to eat.  I never get enough now when I’m home, though when I was on the fresh air farm I had lots,” and, sighing, Tommy seemed sad.

“My father used to write letters to my grandmother—­she is his mother,” he explained.  “When I got so I could understand, my grandmother read them to me.  My father wrote about his ship, and how he sailed away up where the whales are.  Sometimes he would send us money in the letters, and then grandma would make a little party for me.

“But after a while no more letters came.  My grandmother used to ask the postman every day if he didn’t have a letter for her from my father, but there wasn’t any.  Then there was a piece in the paper about a ship that was wrecked.  It was my father’s ship.”

“What’s wrecked?” asked Flossie.

“It means the ship is all smashed to pieces; doesn’t it?” asked Freddie of Tommy.

“That’s it; yes.  My father’s ship was in a storm and was smashed on the rocks.  Everybody on it, and my father too, was drowned in the ocean, the paper said.  That’s why I like the country better than the ocean.”

“I used to like the ocean,” said Flossie slowly.  “We go down to Ocean Cliff sometimes, where Uncle William and Aunt Emily and Cousin Dorothy live.  But I don’t like the ocean so much now, if it made your father drown.”

“Oh, well, there have to be shipwrecks I s’pose,” remarked Tommy.  “But, of course, it was awful hard to lose my father.”  He turned his head away and seemed to be looking out of the window.  Then he went on: